Passion
Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
— Harold Whitman
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Self Confidence II
ByHeatherNo one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
— Eleanor Roosevelt
Yesterday I quoted Martin Luther King, Jr. who said, “A man can’t ride your back unless it is bent.” In today’s quote, Eleanor Roosevelt conveys the same concept in a different voice.
Madness
ByHeatherWe do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.
— Goethe
Goethe lived from 1749 to 1832. In the two centuries since his death I am please to report that the planet has made great strides in mental health. At the dawn of the 21st century we have managed to confine the majority of our disordered minds to the executive suites and the board rooms of our largest corporations. A small consolation to the millions of us who must work in these corporations but progress nonetheless.
Aristotle on Thought
ByHeatherIt is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
— Aristotle
Eleanor Roosevelt’s 3 (+1) rules for happiness
ByHeatherSomeone once asked me what I regarded as the three most important requirements for happiness. My answer was:
A feeling that you have been honest with yourself and those around you; a feeling that you have done the best you could both in your personal life and in your work; and the ability to love others.
But there is another basic requirement, and I can’t understand now how I forgot it at the time…
Own What Makes You Different
ByHeatherWhen we can celebrate and truly own what it is that makes us different, we are able to find the source of our greatest creative power.
— Aimee MullinsAimee is a double below-the-knee amputee who lost her legs before her first birthday. She is talented and beautiful and doesn’t take “no” for an answer. Learn more about her story on You Tube.
More Steinbeck on Writing
ByHeatherSometimes in a man or a woman an awareness takes place — not very often and always inexplainable. There are no words for it because there is no one ever to tell. This is a secret not kept a secret, but locked in wordlessness. The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness. In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplainable. And sometimes if he is very fortunate and if the time is right, a very little of what he is trying to do trickles through.
— John Steinbeck, Journals of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters
This is another installment from Steinbeck’s journals written as he was giving birth to East of Eden. It has echos from my Julian Schnabel quote when he said “That is true about all art. The conflict is to try and take what is inside of you and put it inside somebody else.”